In high school, our social studies teacher had a classroom that was absolutely silent. No one, not even the high school jerks, messed around in that class. We all sat silent and dutifully, listening to the lecture and copiously taking notes.

He was terrifying, with a fabulous temper.

A teacher could lose his temper on a kid back then, and really put the fear into them without getting into trouble like today.

Yet for all his courage and sheer dictatorial control of the room, we used to joke about how he could not say “Jesus Christ” unless it was a swear word. In our world history classes, when we were to be learning about Jesus as an historical figure, he would find word-twisting ways to say his name as little as possible, and when the train of pronouns was too far from the proper noun and he had to speak his name again, it was a kind of mumbly muffled gasp of inarticulate words.

For all his intelligence and knowledge and ability to teach, he could not speak the name of God.

I recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world, a book I’d picked up after reading an interesting article he wrote on his website about teenage Luddites in New York City.

This book seems to have an author with the same difficulty as my high school social studies teacher, for there is nothing of God in it. In all its purported wisdom and useful tips and tricks, in its many references to classic literature and sociologists and scientists and brain scans and evolutionary concepts, there is no God.

“This book is godless,” I wrote in my journal. “The sheer quiet effort to exclude God and any hint at the importance of spiritual things is almost breathtaking, for such a topic.”

Could the author truly be so stripped away from a life of faith, any faith, that it wouldn’t leak into his words in the smallest way? Did his editor demand that, for lowest common denominator reasons, no hint at any particular faith was necessary? It seemed so; this book, while well-written, was clinical and hollow to the core.

Even in an example of a men’s exercise group which has the word “faith” in its title, the author fixates on the social nature of the organization, the fun hidden jargon the members use, and not once treads the pedal of how faith is part of the connection.

Now, I did not expect to find it to be overtly Christian, or pertaining to any faith for that matter, but for all the discussion on what makes a good life and how to spend your leisure time in a more fulfilling way than staring at a screen, there is surprisingly little devoted to what feeds the spiritual being.

There are hints at it, mind you.

Allusions to how humans are a social animal, and how we long for real connection with others in real life, and how our brain lights up in peculiar ways when we are not doing anything in particular, revealing that in our background mode, our brain is seeking relationship.

“Be still and know that I am God,” we are told in Psalm 46:10.

Small wonder that when our brains are not overtly active and we are not chasing after the rabbit on the rail, that it lights up for wanting true relationship. The message across the Bible is that God created us with a longing for relationship with him, and while that is now broken, he has a complete plan and built the bridge; while we can find every possible side distraction to avoid that reality, we all must come face to face with it someday.

You won’t come face to face with it in this book, I’m sorry to say.

You may come away with the ability to reduce the time wasted on Facebook and flimsy media sources, and you may get some fine life hacks on how to increase your leisure time towards meaningful activities, but the eternal impact will be nil.

What’s funny about this book is that so often, the supposedly complex problems that are suggested as solved, probed, or mitigated by various studies, expert advice, and life hacks could all be traced down to something found in God’s Word.

Philippians 4:8 could have replaced most of the chapters.

Ecclesiastes 9:10 makes an appearance in a section on the value of hard work as opposed to spending leisure time staring at screens, though in a godless form.

Psalm 23:2 tells us that rest is so important that God will make us lie down in green pastures if we aren’t going to be serious about rest.

As I read through the book—admittedly rolling my eyes at the woman who specified “they/them” as her pronouns, forcing the author to awkwardly refer to her by her proper name far too much in an effort to avoid the clunkiness of this pronoun nonsense and otherwise marring his fine concise prose—I’d mentally rack up how the Bible already dealt with the concerning issues of weariness, distraction, low productivity, disconnect, anxiety, shallowness, laziness, purposefulness, and addiction that our digital devices have brought us.

I finished the Newport’s book on Digital Minimalism. I felt completely empty and ambivalent about it. It is likely that I was the wrong audience, because I was already doing most of what the author described. To read that it’s a startling new thing to not binge hours of TV and to write down thoughts in a journal and to actually be creative and make things and do physical work like gardening—all seemed fairly obvious to me. Maybe he lives in a world where people use their phones and devices much more than I do. I don’t know.

But I do know what the answer to digital excessiveness is. You want to minimize digital intrusion? You open up your Bible—a real actual book and not an app—and start reading.

That seems too simple, maybe. Perhaps a sign of getting old is that you come back to the Sunday school answer you confidently shouted out as a child: The answer is the Word of God. It’s all there, in the Bible. Not the experts, the brain scans, the studies, the outliers.

In the Bible.

Everything.

I’m serious.

We chase after studies and experts and TED talks and pick through the evidence we see before us and there it sits, the wisdom of the ages in one handy volume, if only we would see it.